“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). Some Christians are in favor of screens in a church service, while some are not. I do not aim to wade into that discussion here. But this image caught my eye in a recent Persian Lutheran worship service, with praise songs featuring female performers. In one particular song, the refrain in Farsi was “In Jesus I am free.” Every Persian woman in that church service had fled her native Islamic culture, in which—sometimes on the pain of death— she had once been required to wear a burqa, niqab or hijab when out in public. An Iranian once described Islamic head coverings to me as a “prisons to-go.” No wonder the Persian women in that room were singing the words “In Jesus I am free” with such gusto. Our Lord has liberated us from the penalty of our sins. But in a second sense, Jesus has also liberated these women from their homeland’s severely misogynistic and cruel culture. And so, the woman in the video was praising her Lord and thanking Him for that double freedom. You can see the joy in her face. It reminded me of a scene that I have often witnessed, as I work with Persian converts to Christianity. When reading for the first time in John 8 the encounter of Jesus and the adulterous woman, it is especially the females who are able to relate to her plight because this same scene occurs time and time again in many Muslim countries even today. Women (but not men!) caught in adultery are at great risk of being stoned to death—exactly like the woman in the Gospel lesson. No wonder Persian Lutheran women here in Germany, whom the Holy Spirit has called to hear the Gospel, sing out at the top of their lungs, with tears running down their face: “I am free in Jesus!” Indeed, Christ Jesus has liberated all of us believers from sin, death, the devil—and these women also from “prisons to-go.”
The Tiews in Germany 